First up: Fox
Standoff (Tuesdays at 8): I adore Ron Livingston and I love Gina Torres so maybe I'm biased, but I enjoyed the show.
Two hostage negotiators try to juggle the danger of their job with the affair the whole department knows they're having. There were some kinks in the first episode - a little contrived dialogue here and there and an eerily self-aware hostage taker - but overall the show's got room to grow. They're definitely taking a risk in getting their two leads together at the beginning, but maybe they're banking on the drama of a work relationship mixed with hostage crises to balance out the boring situation that is TV coupledom. It's not great, but it's got promise as long as the writers can come up with new ways for people to take hostages every week.Vanished (Mondays at 9): A politician's schoolteacher wife is kidnapped from some awards ceremony to honor her awesomeness.
It's a conspiracy that will unfold one episode at a time as the really generic white male cop helps the really generic politician with the exact same haircut find out what happened to his wife, despite the nosy agressive reporter who will stop at nothing to get the story no matter who she hurts. Oh yeah, they went there. Just once can we have a reporter who isn't a bloodthirsty, slutty bitch? The mystery isn't really that interesting and the characters are all so predictable. I was calling out plot points minutes before they happened. Boring, contrived crap.Justice (Wednesdays at 9): Good thing In Justice got cancelled or this could have been messy. Victor Garber plays Jack Bristow as a lawyer. He uses the media and a vast awareness of public opinion to try his cases with the help of his morally questionable team of top-notch attorneys who are all very pretty and much more friendly than he is.
Lots of potential here to explore human perception of right and wrong as the lawyers justify more and more their ethically objectionable behavior. Expect good themes to develop here. At the end of every episode they show you how the crime actually unfolded so you can see who was telling the truth, but I'm not so sure I like that, especially since so far they only give you two options. I hope they get a little more creative in the future, but overall I'm pleased. It's Tivo worthy.'Till Death (Thursdays at 8): Maybe I'd find this show funnier if I were married and hated it.
It's all about how marriage is great in the beginning but will inevitably turn you into a bitter, fat, more boring copy of the Barones. These guys' protrayal of teachers is completely unrealistic, but that's a personal issue for me. I'm not a comedy writer by any means, but I saw several opportunities to be a little less predictable and get a better joke just bypassed for the predictable sitcom relationships we've seen done better somewhere else. Everybody just acted like they were reading from a script. I didn't believe one word that came out of anybody's mouth. And if marriage turns Eddie Kaye Thomas into Brad Garrett, I'm not interested.
Happy Hour (Thursday at 8:30): A good idea poorly executed. A guy's girlfriend breaks up with him, so he moves upstairs to live with the asshat bachelor guy who just lost his roomate to an overbearing girlfriend. Every day at 4 asshat gets drunk with friends, hence the title.
The asshat and his female pal Amanda are well-written and the chick, played by Beth Lacke, is dynamite with her lines, but the protagonist is not working for me and some of the jokes don't make sense. They must have been hilarious on paper, but it's like nobody noticed they don't work on screen. I did genuinely chuckle at a few jokes, but they all came from Amanda. I'm not going to record it, but if I catch it I might not change the channel.
Standoff - good premise and Ron Livingston. What's not to like?
ReplyDeleteYay.
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